Speaker Profile: Rusty Russell

To most people, the world of computer software seems confusing and very lucrative, as startups that perform novel services sell to established corporations for billions of dollars, and firms protect their intellectual property with aggressive litigation.

Rusty Russell sees things differently. He’s spent most of his career working on and advocating for software that’s distributed for free. He made his name in the industry working on the Linux kernel networking subsystem and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds called Rusty ‘one of his top deputies’, and Rusty also created Trivial Patch Monkey for kernel hackers to submit trivial patches to the code base.

In Australia, Rusty conceived the Conference of Australian Linux Users, which became the annual linux.conf.au conference series.

He is intellectual property adviser to Linux Australia and has argued strongly against intellectual property elements of the free trade agreement between Australia and the United States of America. He now works for tech startup Blockstream on Bitcoin technologies, and started his own cryptocurrency project, ‘pettycoin’ in 2014.